1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method of searching a feature vector space for a feature vector that has similar features to a query vector. More specifically, the method of the present invention provides a method for efficiently searching a vector space indexed based on an approximation for a feature vector having features similar to a query vector according to a varying distance measurement.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a multimedia database related to a multimedia application, the contents are typically represented by feature vectors. Similarities among objects are determined by a distance measurement defined by feature distances between the query vector and feature vectors in a feature vector space.
To provide further precise retrievals, a distance measurement may be iteratively performed using collected information such as user feedback. However, a conventional search method does not consider how to iteratively perform a distance measurement according to varying factors in a large database. In particular, a conventional indexing, method in a feature vector space has not addressed how to quickly perform a search in an environment where a distance measurement is changing, such as on-line retrieval. Thus, there still remains a need for accelerating, a search in an environment where a distance measurement is varying.